East Baltimore Redevelopment Project a Model for Effective Eminent Domain

Real property in the United States is deeply entrenched in constitutional statutes that protect the rights vested through ownership. The vast web of legal control is designed to support private enjoyment and curtail unnecessary interference from the government. These fundamental characteristics of American property law can create enormous obstacles for cities and towns striving to remedy issues of property abandonment and vacancy. Abandoned properties often slip into a state of legal limbo because the motivation of ownership has been lost through financial hardships, or diluted by the anonymous nature of institutional investment vehicles. This is where the powerful yet controversial tool of eminent domain comes into play. The Kelobacklash has put shrinking cities in a difficult position in that eminent domain is a critical component to redeveloping vacancy induced blight on a neighborhood scale. As noted in a previous post, the East Baltimore Development project run by EBDI has created a very equitable relocation program for displaced residents of the Middle East Baltimore neighborhood. This relocation program is just one several components that make the East Baltimore project a model for effective Kelo prescribed eminent domain authority. The foundation of the east Baltimore model is community involvement. Neighborhood residents have substantial interaction with the project in all phases. Numerous channels of communication have been established, and multiple organizations such as the resident-formed Save Middle East Action Committee (SMEAC) and the Annie E Casey Foundation ensure resident voices are heard. These measures have created an open and collaborative dialogue between EBDI and neighborhood residents. While progress has been made, statutory reform is required to make the East Baltimore model the standard rather than an outlier. As Jim Kelly, director of the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore puts it, ‘if eminent domain is ever to play its essential role in a just redevelopment of a severely deteriorated urban neighborhood, then the rights of residents to plan the redevelopment and remain in the redeveloped community must be guaranteed by law.”

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There is plenty of disagreement (even among supreme court justices, evidenced by a split decision on the matter) about the use of eminent domain for development projects like those in East Baltimore. Opponents fear that a broad definition of “public purpose” to justify the use of eminent domain to include economically beneficial goals, will disproportionately affect poor communities, which are more easily classified as blighted.
Historically eminent domain has not been used to transfer private property from one entity to another, yet this is basically what has happened. A similar debate over the term “public purpose” has played out in New York as Columbia University attempted expand their campus and was denied the use of eminent domain.
I agree that despite the use of this disruptive process for redevelopment, the city of Baltimore and EBDI have engaged in an open dialogue with displaced families and have initiated a strong support system for transitioning residents. As a result families are moving into safer, more diverse communities, where property values are increasing. Additional support services like the establishment of a homeowner’s academy and financial literacy classes are encouraging measures that should become the norm.
How do you feel about balance between property rights and the need for Baltimore to spur investment and opportunity? Does the specter of eminent domain hang over poor neighborhoods?

Is it possible to get more details on what were the components of relocation plan? Where is the project in its timeline? Annie E. Casey has written extensively on Responsible Relocation — what components of their monograph were used as part of this project?

As a community organizer and activist in East Baltimore, and an active observer of the EBDI process, and an active participant in the redevelopment effort of the Old Town neighborhood just to the west of the Hopkins effort referred to as EBDI in the article, there is a gross mis-statement of both the process and the impact of this effort. To tout it as a model for community development is a dangerous and mistaken assertion. SMEAC was not spawned as a part of a community engagement plan, it was organized as a community reaction to a very abusive and unfair plan and process of a strategic dismantling of a neighborhood by powerful political and economic forces stewarded by the hospital that had a long term plan to turn the neighborhood into its campus.

There are many who have far more information on this process than I. I strongly suggest that before lifting this effort up as a model, a TRUE accounting of the history, which goes back more than 20 years, be conducted.

In addition, there is a dangerous assumption, that has roots in works such as Rusk’s ‘Cities Without Suburbs’ and ‘Baltimore Unbound’, that the best way to deal with the pervasive oppression and resulting poverty of urban, Black neighborhoods is to treat the communities as diseased and to disperse the cancer through urban removal. This ignores the fact that communities are living organisms, and are not just random collections of subhumans that need to be scattered like rats. The disease is the web of forces that have turned such once-vital communities into the devastated, pain-filled places they are. Strategic disinvestment, sub-standard educational institutions, the destruction of economic infrastructure, followed by the erosion of transportation structures killing viable job opportunities for the individuals who lived there, are all just a small part of what eroded these communities. Then the opportunism of such power-yielding institutions like Johns Hopkins, used these communities for what ever it pleased, driving the nail in the proverbial coffin for these communities. This pattern is not unique to Baltimore; it is happening all over urban communities throughout the US.

The past, however, does not equal the future, unless we keep using research on problems, rather than the true sources of the problems, and creative visioning, as the foundation for designing solutions. In Old Town, Baltimore has chosen a different path. The community has organized, with support and guidance from a community-evolved institution, Sojourner-Douglass College, to work with the City to spawn a model of “holistic community development” which blends bricks and mortar development with social development and economic development to lift the community out of the vestiges of oppression, to create WITH the existing community residents, a strategic initiative that chooses elevation of the neighborhood over displacement.

Another model which has been a powerful source of inspiration for the Old Town development effort is the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative [http://www.dsni.org] which used the tool of eminent domain to a very different end. This effort has successfully transformed one of the most devastated neighborhoods in the country, while keeping the fabric of the community in tact, and is now in its second generation of indigenous leadership. We need to look to models such as this that preserve communities rather than destroying them. Though it only takes months to wipe out a neighborhood, It takes generations to build community – this can not be achieved through anything but time. It is a sin to ignore the assets that even the most challenged neighborhoods have at their core.

For more information on the Old Town effort, it is worth a conversation with the members of the Change 4 Real Coalition, who can be reached via the Office of Community Outreach at Sojourner-Douglass College: (410) 276-0306, Ext. 242

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